A: Twitsper is a portmanteau of the words Twitter and whisper. It highlights Twitsper's ability to limit the 'audience' for your tweets to a select group of followers. This selection of the intended audience can be made per each individual tweet.

Q: How is Twitsper different from having a private Twitter account?

A: With a private account you must confirm followers for them to be able to view your tweets. However, any tweet you post will be viewable to any one in this group. This effectively creates one group of possible viewers for all your tweets.

Instead, Twitsper lets you create multiple groups and lets you limit the audience for any tweet to one of these groups. When posting a tweet, you simply select the group to which you want the tweet to be visible. This gives you complete control over who sees each tweet.

Q: Do the people in the group that I whisper to need to be using Twitsper as well?

A: No. Whispers are actually sent as messages. If a person in the group you have selected is not using Twitsper, they will receive your tweet as a normal message. The benefit for your followers in using Twitsper as well is that their Twitsper client will notify them when a message they receive from you is a whisper and allow them to respond back to the entire group to which you whispered.

Q: How does whispering work?

A: Whispering is an abstraction provided by Twitsper. When you whisper to 10 of your followers, 10 messages are sent out, one to each follower. If one of these followers is also using Twitsper then their Twitsper client will recognize that the message he/she received is actually a whisper and will display it as such. If a follower is not using Twitsper, then they will still receive your whisper, but it will appear to be just a normal message.

Q: Why are my whispers showing up in my messages?

A: As mentioned in the answer to the previous question, whispers are delivered using messages. When using the Twitsper client, the user is shown these messages as whispers. In other Twitter clients, they will show up in the messages section. This is not a bug, but a consequence of our implementation of Twitsper.

Q: What does "Reply-All" on whispers do?

A: Clicking “Reply-All” on a whisper you have received allows you to not only send a reply to the original author of the private message, but also to whisper to others in the group to which the original whisper was posted. Remember that whispers are shown to a private group that you create. To ensure the privacy of your replies, your "Reply-All" whisper is posted only to the subset of the original group who are your followers.

For example, imagine that Alice sends a whisper to a group of 10 of her followers, one of which is you. When you send a “Reply-All” whisper, it is sent not only back to Alice but also to the other members of the original group who follow you. For greater privacy, you may disable the ability for the recipients to “Reply-All” when you post a whisper to a group, if you do not wish the recipients to be able to reply to the private group.

Q: How do whispers differ from messages?

A: A message on Twitter can be sent to only one of your followers. When you reply to a message you send a message back to the original author. Whispers on the other hand behave more like tweets in that they are broadcast to a group of followers. The key characteristics of whispers are that you get to choose the group to which the tweet is visible and you can choose to “Reply-All” to a whisper.

Q: Whom can I whisper to?

A: Whispers can be sent to anyone to whom you can send a message, i.e., anyone who follows you. Thus, you can whisper to a group comprising any subset of your followers. You can create groups by selecting a list of your followers within the Twitsper client or using any other Twitter client.

Q: How do I create a list of people that I can whisper to?

A: You can create a list within the Twitsper client by selecting from among your followers. The lists you create are stored on Twitter, not on your phone or on Twitsper's servers. So, you can also create lists from other Twitter clients, e.g., online at twitter.com.